Cyber Attack on Stockholm's Sophiahemmet Hospital

Information stolen from Stockholm's Sophiahemmet hospital in a cyber attack last week has been listed for sale on the dark web by the Medusa ransomware group. According to tech newspaper, Medusa has now listed the data for sale on its website on the dark web, where it is asking for a million US dollars to delete the data. The group has also published what's known as a proof of compromise, showing what kind of data the group has obtained.

Sophiahemmet University is a Swedish institution for higher education associated with Sophiahemmet. In addition to a degree in nursing, the institution also offers programmes at advanced level, such as Specialist Nursing programmes, as well as Bachelor, Master and Diploma programmes.

Medusa Ransomware Group's Operations

Medusa is a RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) that made its debut in the summer of 2021 and has evolved to be one of the more active RaaS platforms. Attack volumes were inconsistent in the first half of 2023 with a resurgence of attack activity in the last half of 2023. The attackers restart infected machines in safe mode to avoid detection by security software as well preventing recovery by deleting local backups, disabling startup recovery options, and deleting VSS Shadow Copies to thwart encryption rollback.

Medusa ramped up attacks in the latter part of 2022 and have been one of the more active groups in the first quarter of 2023 but appear to have waned somewhat in the second quarter. Medusa typically demands ransoms in the millions of dollars which can vary depending on the target organization’s ability to pay.

The Medusa RaaS operation (not to be confused with the operators of the earlier MedusaLocker ransomware) typically compromises victim networks through malicious email attachments (macros), torrent websites, or through malicious ad libraries. Medusa can terminate over 280 Windows services and processes without command line arguments (there may be a Linux version as well, but it is unclear at this time.)

Medusa targets multiple industry verticals, especially healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, and public sector organizations too. Medusa also employs a double extortion scheme where some data is exfiltrated prior to encryption, but they are not as generous with their affiliate attackers, only offering as much as 60% of the ransom if paid.